>>>>>>>>>NEWS FLASH<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Jim will be giving a talk on the backstory of Disney's animated film "Frozen" at the Bloomingdale Branch of the New York Public Library on Saturday, May 16th.
There's still time to sign up by sending email to events@etccustomevents.com.

When it comes to the Walt Disney Parks & Resorts , it's kind of a tradition that good enough isn't really good enough. Case in point: " Pirates of the Caribbean ." When Walt Disney first envisioned bringing buccaneers into his first theme park in the late 1950s, he was thinking...

So how do you follow Disney "Frozen," the top grossing animated film of all time ? That Academy Award-winning motion picture which then went on became a pop culture phenomenon ? The movie that taught people around the planet to "Let It Go" ? The quick answer is: You don't. Borrowing...

It's the question that most animation professionals ask immediately after they've seen " Get A Horse! " How did Walt Disney Animation Studios actually pull that short off? How'd they first replicate the exact look & feel of a Mickey Mouse cartoon of late 1928 / early 1929 and...

To be asked to participate in the first reading of a brand-new Disney animated feature was like a dream come true for Josh Gad. "You have to understand that -- when I was growing up -- I was absolutely obsessed with the animated films of Disney's Second Golden Age," Gad explained during...

Even though today is Mickey Mouse's 85th anniversary, this Disney icon looks like he hasn't aged a day. Especially if you watch this classic cartoon character capering in his newest ground-breaking theatrical short, " Get A Horse! " As you can see by the clip which accompanies today's...

So how long has Walt Disney Animation Studios been trying to bring " The Snow Queen " to the big screen? Would you believe 70 years? Concept painting for the aborted Hans Christian Andersen bio pic that Walt Disney and Samuel Goldwyn once considered collaborating on. Copyright Disney Enterprises...

For those of you who are keeping tabs on which classic Disney characters have been popping up on ABC 's " Once Upon A Time ," this Sunday's episode really is a must-see. Why For? Well, since Emma & the crew from Storybrooke are wandering all over Neverland searching for Henry, who...

So it was Walt who dreamed up the Disney Company. And it was his older brother Roy O. who repeatedly found the funds necessary to turn Walt's dreams into reality. And it was Michael Eisner who took Disney when it was dead last in Hollywood (Out of the eight studios in town that were making movies...

Have you been watching these new Mickey Mouse shorts that the folks at Disney Television Animation recently began producing? The seventh in this series -- "GASP!" --- debuted on the Disney Channel this past Friday. And while I know that there are some animation experts & Disney purists...

Hey, gang! My apologies for JHM being light on content these past few days. But over the weekend, I was out in Ohio at Dayton Disneyana . Which is this two day-long event presented by the Plane Crazy Chapter of the Disneyana Fan Club . Photo by Jim Hill Disney historian Jim Korkis and I gave a couple...

Hey, guys! Check out this cool poster for Walt Disney Animation Studios , "Get A Horse!" Just so you know, this never-before-seen short is making its world debut at the Annecy Animation Festival in Annecy, France. And to quote the WDAS press release that I received earlier this morning, "Get...

Toon fans and film historians just don't know what to make of Walt Disney Animation Studios ' " Get a Horse! " There's a real air of mystery surrounding this animated short. The fact that it's done in black-and-white, features rubber-hose, pie-eyed versions of classic Disney...

If you listen carefully today, you can hear thousands of people around the country quietly cursing. "And why are these people cursing?," you ask. Well, that's because these folks are just now realizing it's February 13th. Which means that tomorrow is Valentine's Day. That day when...

For three weeks now, photos of a mysterious bankers box have been making the rounds on the Web. Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof reportedly deliberately put these images out there to help whet people's appetites for " Tomorrowland ," the sci-fi -themed project that these two wrote which is...

The full-length animated features that Walt Disney Animation Studios has produced over the past 75 years can mostly be sorted into two distinctly different piles: Those films that Walt personally had a hand in and those movies which were produced after Disney passed away. Please note that I said "mostly...

Last Monday afternoon, I was at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum and overheard a pretty funny exchange between two of the docents who'd been assigned to work the " D23 presents Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives " exhibit. Photo by Alice Hill It seems that one of these...

The old adage is "April Showers bring May Flowers." Image courtesy of S/R Laboratories. All rights reserved Well, Nancy and I are down in Orlando right now. And this year, April Showers seems to be bringing May Downpours. Which suggests that June might be a really good time to go shopping for...

Today's the day that the 2012 Newport Beach Film Festival officially gets underway. And given that -- for the past four years now -- this annual event has been a lot of animation fans' radar thanks to those "Evenings of Disney Rarities" screenings that Oscar-nominated producer Don Hahn...

As a longtime fan of hand-drawn animation, it did my heart good this past weekend to see Disney's "The Lion King" once again wind up on top of the box office heap. To have the 3D version of this 1994 Academy Award-winner gross $30.1 million (which is more than twice what the No. 2 film...

They're the films that The Walt Disney Company was actually founded on. Those animated shorts which wowed moviegoers back in the 1930s & 1940s that then paved the way for the Studio's success in feature-length cartoons. But with the rise of television in the 1950s, America's movie-going...